Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Prof: Right.
Well, we'd better get started because there's quite a lot of
ground to cover today as you will see from the handouts.
Okay.
Well, we all know that Henry VIII had six queens:
divorced, beheaded, died, divorced,
beheaded, survived.
And that makes good television, and bad television too,
>
and all of those queens are marked on your handouts in the
appropriate place in bold Q1 to Q6,
but the real reason that his reign was so important in
English history is of course that he initiated the English
reformation, a momentous change with very
far-reaching consequences.
And Henry's interesting marital career was essentially part of
that larger process, set in train by the will of a
powerful king.
Well, for that reason the English reformation was once
famously described as being essentially "an act of
state," its essence being the transfer of legal authority
over the church in England from a distant papacy to a very
present English crown.
The universal Catholic Church in England became the Anglican
Church of England.
So an act of state, and an act of state it
certainly was.
It was initiated by the crown and directed from above and
carried through by successive acts of Parliament.
And yet it was also, of course, so much more than
that because these acts of state also inaugurated fundamental
changes in the religious culture of the nation.
Looking at the whole, it's certainly possible to
distinguish, as Christopher Haigh does,
a series of legislative reformations,
on the one hand, and to distinguish that from,
on the other hand, what he terms the Protestant
reformation, which was a much more gradual
and much more diffuse process of religious change extending over
generations.
And yet the two dimensions of the reformation,
the legislative and the Protestant, inevitably went
together.
What was once seen as being a very purposeful process of
change-- carefully directed,
swiftly accomplished-- now tends to be seen as a much
more hesitant and uncertain business,
but to call the whole thing, as Christopher Haigh,
does "a series of blundering steps"
is perhaps to go a wee bit too far,
because there certainly was purposeful action and the
reformation process became much more deliberative over time as
the issues gradually became clearer and as the religious
alignments to which it gave rise gradually crystallized.
Christopher Haigh's account of it all provides us with an
excellent overview, the details of which take the
narrative up to 1603.
But what I want to do in the lecture today is to emphasize
the contributions of each phase of development in the crucial
generation from the late 1520s through to 1558--
the various stages which contributed to an emerging
religious division-- and I want to try to bring out
the logic of those phases of development.
All of this can be very confusing in the details,
but there is a certain logic to it.
And that means in the first instance grasping how successive
political situations gave rise to particular developments which
had consequences for religious change,
one way or the other, and then later on in section
discussion we'll explore further the larger question of the
extent to which these changes were welcome or unwelcome for
the people at large and the very gradual process of their
acceptance.
So let's look at the first phase which ran roughly from
1527 to 1531, which we can call a gathering
crisis.
Well, if there was a phase of blundering about,
as Christopher Haigh puts it, then it came at the beginning,
and it was occasioned of course by the fact that the King and
his advisers were facing a completely unprecedented
situation in 1527.
Henry needed a male heir, as you know.
The future of the Tudor dynasty and of the political stability
which it had reestablished might hang on that fact of an
undisputed succession.
Henry was thirty-six.
His wife, Katherine, was in her early forties.
No child was now likely.
Now, as you know, Katherine had originally come
to England as the bride of Henry's older brother,
Arthur, who had shortly died and she had subsequently married
Henry.
Brooding on this, Henry by 1527 became
preoccupied with a biblical text,
Leviticus 20:21, which translates as "if a
man shall take his brother's wife it is an unclean thing.
He hath uncovered his brother's nakedness and they shall be
childless."
And at the same time, on a somewhat less principled
note, Henry's eye had been caught by
a young woman of the court, Anne Boleyn,
whom he saw as a potential new queen.
She was in her early twenties, vivacious, ambitious and
astute, and she was not willing to be the king's mistress;
she intended to be queen.
So Henry needed to get his existing marriage dissolved.
He needed it to be declared void from the beginning by the
Pope and to take a new queen, and it should have been very
easy since popes were usually willing to cooperate with the
needs of kings in such matters.
But it was rendered difficult by two factors.
First of all, Katherine was a very strong
personality.
Her sense of honor was outraged by the idea that her marriage
should be dissolved in this way, and in 1527 as matters began to
reach a head her nephew, the Emperor Charles V of the
Holy Roman Empire of Germany, gained control of the Pope,
Clement VII, in the course of his Italian
wars.
Now all Henry really needed was a delegation of authority from
Rome to settle the matter and in 1628 it looked like he might get
it.
In that year a papal ambassador, Cardinal Campeggio,
was sent to England and he and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey were
empowered to establish the facts regarding Henry's marriage,
but in hearings that they inaugurated in 1529 Queen
Katherine vigorously defended the validity of her marriage.
She denied that there had been any *** consummation to
Prince Arthur, Henry's older brother.
She embarrassed the King by publicly declaring that he knew
she had been a *** when they married.
She defended her honor and her marriage.
And then in July 1529 new victories of the Emperor in
Italy meant the Pope was even more firmly under his control
and the Pope revoked the case back to Rome.
So the first phase of the developing crisis was efforts to
put pressure on the papacy by threatening the privileges of
the church in England in order to get the Pope to cooperate.
In September 1529, Cardinal Wolsey,
who had clearly failed Henry, was threatened with the legal
charge of praemunire, which was an offense
established by statutes in the fourteenth century regarding the
jurisdiction of church and state within England.
He had allegedly illegally exercised his powers as the
pope's legate in England.
And a couple of months later Parliament was called and the
members of Parliament were encouraged by royal counselors
to lay complaints not only against Cardinal Wolsey but also
against other alleged abuses in church affairs.
So, at this stage Henry is blustering,
he was deliberately stoking up the latent resentment of
clerical privileges amongst members of Parliament,
but as yet there was no intention to go further.
Indeed, having set things going in this manner,
fired his warning shots as it were,
the King sent Parliament into recess between December of 1529
and January of 1531, and in the meantime he
assembled a think tank of academics and clergy to prepare
his legal case for a divorce.
And he began consulting learned opinion amongst lawyers and
theologians from Europe's various major universities.
But none of this had the desired effect and in 1530 the
Pope cited Henry to appear before him in Rome and forbade
him to remarry until he did so.
The King was both frustrated and furious,
and he found reasons to fail to comply with the Pope's
requirements in the materials which were being assembled by
his academic research team.
These survive and they're known as the Collecteana and
they included some crucial arguments.
One was the argument that historically the church in
England had exercised independent provincial rights.
That's to say it had the right to autonomy in the settlement of
certain internal affairs without reference to Rome.
The second crucial argument, which they put forward,
was that within England the king enjoyed imperial power,
not only over the state but over the church in matters which
were not of a strictly spiritual nature.
So Henry, still hoping for a change in the European political
situation which would lead to papal cooperation,
used these ideas to put a bit more pressure on the church.
In 1530, his lawyers indicted the entire clergy in England for
praemunire, illegally acquiescing in the
exercise of papal authority.
The convocation of the church, meeting in Canterbury,
resisted and Henry demanded that they recognize his supreme
headship of the church.
And they eventually did so.
They recognized his authority but only "so far as the law
of God allows," a saving clause,
and they gave the King a grant of 120,000 pounds from the
church to try to sweeten his mood.
So where are we in 1531?
The King and the church have fallen out badly over Henry's
need for a dissolution of his marriage.
The central issue has been clarified.
The central issue has become that of legal jurisdiction of
the papacy over the English church and therefore its ability
to frustrate his divorce since the church had authority over
marriage.
But there was no question of any doctrinal challenge to the
Roman Catholic Church, no challenge in matters of
faith or matters of worship.
This is a legal issue at this point: which brings us to phase
two, the Royal Supremacy.
As 1531 advanced, there was no indication that
the Pope was going to give way and the political impasse
precipitated the second phase of development,
the royal supremacy, and it was masterminded by
Thomas Cromwell between 1532 and 1535.
Now a brief word on Thomas Cromwell.
He was a man of very humble origins, the son of a London
cloth worker and tavern keeper.
He had had an obscure early career.
He'd probably served as a soldier in Germany,
he had worked as a merchant, and eventually he went into the
law.
In the 1520s, he gradually emerged as a very
skillful man of business in the household of Cardinal Wolsey,
much trusted by Wolsey for his astuteness and competence.
And in 1530 when Wolsey fell such was Cromwell's reputation
that he was taken into the King's service and by 1530 was
made a member of the council.
And it was Cromwell who saw the way out of the legal impasse
through a carefully planned program of legislation.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
Memoranda in his own hand survive which show the stages of
his planning, and in 1532 to '34 his strategy
of making Henry's divorce possible and then legitimizing
these changes was executed stage by stage through the careful
presentation of the King's desires to Parliament and
management of Parliament to get them passed.
First of all, they put still more pressure on
the church to break any resistance within England.
Parliament was brought to pass the Act in Restraint of Annates.
Annates were payments to Rome which were made when bishops
were appointed.
This canceled them, but the Act was held in
suspension as a threat to papal finance.
Secondly, the House of Commons put forward what was called its
Supplication Against the Ordinaries,
a petition against the exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction
in the church courts in England and the abuses which allegedly
took place.
This was an attack which provoked the convocation of the
church, its own assembly, to reject the accusations.
Henry then rounded angrily on them and demanded their full
submission, and in May 1532 they caved in.
The convocation submitted and abandoned its claim to legal
jurisdictional independence.
The way was now clear in England, but there was still no
response from Rome and then fate lent a hand.
In August 1532, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Archbishop Warham, died.
Henry and Cromwell managed to secure the appointment and the
confirmation from Rome of Thomas Cranmer as the new Archbishop of
Canterbury.
Now Cranmer was a Cambridge academic who had taken a great
interest in the early development of Protestantism in
the 1520s.
Henry and Cromwell knew him as one of the King's think tank and
they knew that he was willing to do Henry's bidding over the
divorce.
With that confidence, an Archbishop of Canterbury who
would do the King's will, Anne Boleyn at last gave in to
Henry's importunities.
By December 1532 she was known to be pregnant and in January of
1533 they were secretly married.
The King was willing to go ahead and do that because he was
convinced that his first marriage would be declared to
have been void.
But now with Anne pregnant things had to move fast.
In April of 1533, Parliament was brought to pass
the Act in Restraint of Appeals, a crucial statute.
This declared that England was an imperial monarchy,
no foreign jurisdiction was valid within its boundaries,
no appeals against a judicial decision made in England could
be taken outside the kingdom.
And accordingly in May of 1533 Cranmer assembled a court,
annulled Henry's marriage to Katherine of Aragon.
And in June 1533, Anne, already secretly married
to the King, was crowned as queen,
already six months pregnant with the future Queen Elizabeth
I who was born on the seventh of September.
And in the same month, September 1533,
the Pope responded by excommunicating the King,
casting him out of the church, but he held the excommunication
in suspension in case Henry would begin to behave.
But Henry didn't behave.
That wasn't his way.
>
In 1534, Parliament passed the Succession Act declaring the
validity of the annulment of Henry's marriage and his
remarriage and fixing the succession to the crown in the
new line.
Oaths were required from all major office holders to respect
the Act of Succession.
An Act for Submission of the Clergy was passed to legally
enshrine the clergy's submission and finally the Act of
Supremacy, which declared Henry VIII to be
the Supreme Head of the Church of England.
In sum then, the necessity of securing the
Tudor dynasty had led to England entering into a state of schism.
Schism.
They had rejected the jurisdictional authority of
Rome, they had asserted the royal
supremacy over the church, and in 1534 to '5 this was
backed up with a flurry of executions of individuals who
dared to defend the Aragon marriage and the authority of
the pope, and those who were executed
included John Fisher, the reforming Bishop of
Rochester who could not tolerate this,
and most famously Thomas More, the former Lord Chancellor,
former good servant of the King, who also could not stomach
this and died for it.
So we now enter a third phase, the Henrician Reformation.
Now on the face of it, the royal supremacy over the
church had nothing whatever to do with religious reformation.
It was a rejection for reasons of state of the supposedly
usurped legal jurisdictional powers of the Bishop of Rome,
but it had nothing to do with Protestantism and it was not
intended to inaugurate reform in matters of faith or worship.
But of course it did.
It took place in a context of the reformation in Europe.
It aligned England against Rome, if not necessarily with
the Protestant princes of Germany, or the Protestant
cantons of Switzerland.
It gave an initial foothold to that minority who favored some
measure of religious reform, and there were already people
around the King who were prepared to use that opportunity
purposefully, though necessarily with extreme
caution.
Thomas Cromwell certainly favored reform.
Queen Anne favored reform.
She received Protestant books which were secretly brought to
her by London merchants and read them with interest.
Thomas Cranmer favored reform, as he had done for some years.
On the other hand, most of the bishops and most of
the nobility were willing to go only so far with Henry.
They would accept the royal supremacy for the good of the
kingdom, for the good of the succession,
but they hoped that it would all end ultimately in a
reconciliation with Rome.
So they would go along for the time being.
The key figure in all of this of course was Henry then
himself, and once he had the royal supremacy Henry found that
he rather liked it.
>
He was happy to adopt the position of a moderate reformer
of abuses and over time he increasingly came to believe in
his own propaganda.
He saw himself as a Solomon, as a Josiah who had promulgated
God's law and purged the land of abuses and idolatry.
And at the same time the King was notoriously susceptible to
influence and if those who held his trust were able to steer
things in the direction that they favored,
then the King might back them if they were cautious,
though they were always well advised to proceed with extreme
caution in order to retain the King's confidence.
He was willing to be influenced but he could react fiercely if
he thought he was being abused.
Well, in the mid to late 1530s Thomas Cromwell and Thomas
Cranmer certainly had the King's trust.
They had served him very well as Archbishop of Canterbury in
Cranmer's case or in Cromwell's case as Vicegerent in
Spirituals, the office of administering the
church on behalf of the King.
And they did a great deal to mold developments.
In 1536, they issued ten articles of faith and a set of
injunctions for the practice of worship in the church which
moved very, very cautiously in a reformist
direction.
In 1536, Thomas Cromwell organized a visitation,
an inspection, of the monasteries which was
deliberately intended to find abuses and which led,
later in 1536, to the dissolution of all
religious houses worth less than 200 pounds a year,
the smaller monasteries.
It was not presented as an attack on monasticism in
principle but as an attack upon abuses.
It was a severe shock and it was one of the issues which
provoked in 1536 rebellion in the north of England.
That rebellion, which we'll deal with on
another occasion, was suppressed in 1537 and in
the aftermath of that suppression the larger
monasteries were gradually cajoled and encouraged and
bullied into surrendering freely their possessions to the crown.
By 1540, every monastery and nunnery in the kingdom had gone.
In 1537, Cromwell and Cranmer engineered the issue of the
Bishop's Book, a set of homilies which again
moved cautiously towards Protestant definitions of faith.
In 1538, the great shrines, the great centers of pilgrimage
at Canterbury and Durham and elsewhere were dissolved,
their riches seized by the crown, broken up on the grounds
that they had been idolatrously abused.
And in 1538 the Bible was issued in English;
the Great Bible, a translation into English
which was actually based upon the translations of the Bible by
William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale,
both of whom were Protestants.
That was not officially admitted but it was a fact.
These were the only translations ready to hand and
they needed to produce the Bible quickly.
The Great Bible, then, was issued and on the
frontispiece, the magnificent frontispiece of
the Bible, shows Henry sitting in majesty
handing down the word of God to his grateful people.
There was not much doubt that by 1539 things had gone a lot
farther than anyone anticipated and that elements of reformed
doctrine were being gradually smuggled into Henry's church.
But in that year the King called a halt.
The situation had changed again.
Another of the events of 1536, to go back a few years,
was the fall of Anne Boleyn.
After her marriage to the King and the promising start of the
birth of Princess Elizabeth, no male heir had been born.
Anne had suffered a series of miscarriages.
She was in a state of acute nervous anxiety,
understandably.
Eventually, she was suspected.
Word was brought to the kKng planting suspicions that she had
committed adultery in her desperation to have a child.
Other accusations were brought against her.
The Queen was arrested and executed, and shortly thereafter
Henry married Jane Seymour, another lady of the court.
The death shortly after that of Queen Katherine meant that the
marriage to Jane Seymour was now of undoubted legitimacy--
both of Henry's earlier queens were dead--
and in 1537 she gave birth, at last,
to a male heir, Prince Edward.
Jane herself died in childbed.
So the King had his son.
That could have cleared the way for reconciliation with Rome and
his more conservative counselors hoped that it would do so
quickly, but here again Henry's
personality proved vital.
By now Henry sincerely believed in his role as Supreme Head of
the Church of England.
The question at issue was how he would exercise his power.
His conservative counselors persuaded him of the dangers of
the growth of radical Protestantism in the country.
They pointed out that Anabaptists had been discovered
in London, that there were so-called 'Sacramentarians' at
large.
These were people who followed the Swiss reformation's teaching
on the nature of Holy Communion.
In 1539, Henry was persuaded to endorse the Act of Six Articles
which returned England to unambiguous Catholic doctrinal
orthodoxy in matters of faith.
And in 1540 Thomas Cromwell, having been accused by his
enemies of secretly encouraging heresy, was arrested and swiftly
executed.
His real crime was in fact the fiasco of having arranged the
King's fourth marriage, his marriage to the German
princess Anne of Cleves, which brought Henry into
alignment with the Lutheran princes of Germany.
Henry, deceived by a flattering portrait, was horrified when
Anne of Cleves arrived.
He described her as a "Flemish mare."
He refused to consummate the marriage and it was swiftly
dissolved.
This was a lucky break for Anne of Cleves who retired to estates
in eastern England where she happily lived out the rest of
her life, so she came out of this quite
well >
all things considered.
Thomas Cromwell lost his head.
Now this phase of events is often portrayed as a return to
full Catholic orthodoxy accompanied by a reinvigoration
of traditional worship in the parishes.
But I think again that goes too far.
What was ruling in the late years of Henry was not full
Catholic orthodoxy.
It was really Henry's own peculiarly idiosyncratic
conscience and desires in matters of religion.
Henry would certainly burn the occasional radical Protestant if
one was caught, but he also executed the
occasional Catholic for opposing the royal supremacy.
On one occasion he made a demonstration by having several
of each executed on the same day.
You can say what you like about Henry, not a nice man,
a persecutor, but he was an equal opportunity
persecutor.
>
Henry was listening to some of the conservative voices in the
council, especially Bishop Gardiner of
Winchester and the conservative faction which circulated around
Thomas Howard, the Earl of Norfolk.
He came under their influence quite heavily in 1540 when
Norfolk brought to his attention his young niece,
Katherine Howard, who became Henry's new bride,
his fifth wife, pushed into his bed at the age
of eighteen by her uncle in the hope of assuring greater
influence for his faction.
Nevertheless, although Henry was increasingly
under the influence of conservative figures,
he never lost his trust in Thomas Cranmer and indeed he
shielded Cranmer from enemies who would have loved to bring
about his fall.
And after the discovery of Katherine Howard's actual
adultery in 1542 and her execution,
the King was much less influenced by his more
conservative advisers.
Certainly, the gradual drift of the 1530s in the direction of
some kind of neo-Lutheran reform of doctrine had halted,
but England's religion under Henry in his later years was not
full orthodoxy.
Parish religion was not as it had been.
The cult of the saints and the shrines and the relics had been
greatly reduced.
The cult of purgatory was gone.
The monasteries were gone.
And on the more positive side a new vernacular religious culture
using the English Bible and English service books had come
into being.
And if really, truly doctrinally Protestant
people were still very much a minority they were a growing
minority and to some extent a powerful minority.
They included some very powerful people whose potential
influence was out of all proportion to their numbers.
Cranmer was still the archbishop and he favored and
helped reformers in the universities and in the church.
In 1543, Henry's last queen, Queen Catherine Parr,
who was as much his nurse as his queen,
came into a position of authority and she again showed
great sympathy towards reform.
The so-called Seymour Circle at court,
those gathered around Edward and Thomas Seymour,
the brothers of Henry's dead queen,
Jane Seymour, and the uncles of young Prince
Edward, also favored Protestantism--and
above all, perhaps, in their direct
influence, the tutors who were appointed
to the young Prince Edward and to his sister,
Princess Elizabeth, appointed by Archbishop
Cranmer, were all closet Protestants.
So all of this was the legacy of the Henrician reformation.
It had not been a truly Protestant reformation but I
think it marked a far more significant break with tradition
than is sometimes recognized.
Okay.
Let's move on now to a fourth phase, the Edwardian
reformation.
Henry VIII at last died in January 1547,
aged only fifty-six though he'd been in a state of some
decrepitude for years.
And the new king, King Edward,
was only nine and a half years old and that of course is
another of those contingencies that helped to shape the history
of the reformation.
Edward's uncle, Edward Seymour,
led a group of reform-minded men in taking control at the
center of power.
Seymour was appointed protector of the young prince and Duke of
Somerset.
Now as Duke of Somerset and protector,
Seymour and his friends' prime interest was advancing their own
power and influence, but there's little doubt that
he was also of sincere Protestant views and in that
context Archbishop Cranmer was able to exercise far more
influence than he had since 1539.
The changes in religion which were brought about in the next
two and a half years suggest a very high degree of commitment
of these men at the center.
They may not have known in 1547 just how far they were going to
go, but they certainly intended to
go further than Henry VIII had and they acted swiftly once they
had the power.
In 1547, Parliament was persuaded to repeal the heresy
laws and the Six Articles; no more burning of Protestants.
They issued reformist injunctions for the removal of
images and the obliteration of religious paintings by
whitewashing them in the churches.
That's when those paintings I described to you in Saint
Agatha's Easby were whitewashed, only to be discovered again 400
years later.
A book of homilies was issued, official sermons of broadly
Lutheran sympathy in their doctrine.
Religious guilds and confraternities were suppressed
and their goods were confiscated by the crown.
In 1548, communion was allowed in 'both kinds';
that is, both bread and wine were administered to the laity
in the Protestant style.
And in 1549 Cranmer issued a prayer book, and an act of
uniformity to insist upon its use, which was at least half
Protestant in doctrine.
That prayer book brought brief rebellion in the west of
England, the so-called Prayer Book
Rebellion, which centered in the counties
of the southwest and led briefly to the siege of Exeter before a
royal army arrived to disperse the rebels and to follow their
dispersal with the savage repression of this resistance.
Something like 4,000 rebels were either killed or executed
immediately after the rebellion.
As a result, though, Somerset's dominance in
the council was shaken and he was replaced as a central figure
by John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland.
That change at the center, however, did not lead to any
change in religious policy.
In fact, Dudley backed additional innovations in order
to keep the support of Archbishop Cranmer and indeed
the favor of the young King himself.
Edward by this time had emerged as a youth of pronouncedly
evangelical Protestant beliefs and inclinations,
verging indeed on bigotry.
He was often described as the 'young Josiah',
a biblical figure, the young king who would bring
true reform and cleansing of the church.
In particular, in 1552 a further prayer book
was issued, a revised prayer book,
this one decisively and openly Protestant,
and it was backed in 1553 by an emphatically Protestant
statement of faith, the Forty-two Articles.
So, okay, let's take stock.
The Church of England under Henry VIII was a peculiarly
personal blend of doctrinal orthodoxy with elements of
reform in worship and practice.
But a true Protestant minority had emerged especially in London
and the southeast and among certain powerful members of the
social elite, and under the boy king Edward
VI and his two regents true Protestant reform moved ahead
rapidly over six years.
By 1553, the Church of England was clearly Protestant in
doctrine and in forms of worship,
centered on the English Bible and on the Prayer Book and the
nation had become deeply divided in matters of faith.
And that leads us to the fifth phase of this process,
the Marian Reaction.
Edward VI, the boy king, died of pulmonary tuberculosis
only a month after the issue of the Protestant Forty-two
Articles of Religion and the wheel turned again.
Desperate to avoid loss of power, the Duke of
Northumberland proclaimed as queen Lady Jane Grey,
the nearest Protestant successor who could be named
except Princess Elizabeth, who was left out because she
was still stigmatized as illegitimate.
Henry VIII's daughter, Mary, who at this time was
living in seclusion in East Anglia, was not willing to
accept this.
As the daughter of King Henry and of Katherine of Aragon,
she raised support amongst the gentry of East Anglia,
formed an army and began to move towards London.
The Duke of Northumberland lost his nerve.
He disbanded his troops, capitulated and gave himself
up.
So after the turmoil of the previous twenty-five years Mary
had become queen after all.
The thing Henry had sought so hard to avoid had happened.
Now how far Mary's success in being able to raise troops and
finding widespread support for her accession to the crown,
how far it was a result of the fact of her Tudor blood and that
she clearly was the direct heir, or how far it depended upon the
appeal of the fact that she was known to be deeply loyal to the
old religion, that's an open question.
But a deeply loyal Catholic she certainly was.
Her young life had been blighted by the dissolution of
her mother's marriage and the King's subsequent actions.
She clung, as part of her very identity you could say,
to the old religion and her subsequent policies bear the
stamp of that.
And they also reveal just how divided the nation had become by
this stage.
Late in 1553, soon after her accession,
Parliament was persuaded to repeal Edward's Act of
Uniformity which had enforced uniform Protestant worship in
the nation.
Interestingly though, eighty members of Parliament
were brave enough to oppose that action.
Early in 1554, Mary married.
She married Prince Philip of Spain,
the future King Philip II, and that marriage was accepted
by Parliament, though with great reluctance
and only after the suppression of a brief flurry of rebellion
in Kent where Sir Thomas Wyatt led a small army to try to seize
London and prevent the Spanish marriage.
The citizens of London shut the gates against him and he was
defeated and executed.
Then, in the fall of 1554, full papal jurisdiction was
restored in England.
Cardinal Reginald Pole, the great English churchman who
had been living in exile in Italy,
arrived to absolve the realm from its schism and was
appointed Archbishop of Canterbury,
but interestingly he was only--the absolution of England
from schism-- was only accepted after the
Pope had agreed that monastery land would remain with those who
had been granted it or who had purchased it under Henry VIII.
That would not be restored to the church.
England then was part of the Catholic fold again,
though on terms.
Many Protestant ministers in the church were deprived of
their livings and many of them went into exile abroad.
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were also purged.
Some members of Cambridge colleges and some members of
Oxford colleges went into exile abroad.
Something like 800 ministers or laymen and their families of
pronouncedly Protestant belief also went into exile.
From December 1554, those who remained in England
faced the penalties of a revival of the Heresy Act,
punishing heresy with death, and the burnings began.
Between 1555 and 1558, over 300 people were burned at
the stake.
Some of them were amongst the most notable figures of the
Henrician and Edwardian church.
Bishops Latimer and Ridley, two leading Protestants,
were burned at Oxford in 1555.
Latimer--they were burned facing each other in the
marketplace at Oxford-- Latimer famously calling out to
Ridley as the flames came up, "be brave, Master Ridley.
Play the man."
Archbishop Cranmer was also burned at Oxford in 1556.
He had temporally recanted his Protestantism from his fear of
death but then went back on his recantation,
declared openly his commitment to the new religion and was
burned in 1556, holding out into the flames the
hand with which he had signed his recantation.
"This hand hath offended,"
he said.
Most of the people who were burned, however,
were not the great leaders of the church but humble people,
most of them from London and the southeast.
In fact, almost half the burnings took place in London,
in the city of Colchester and in Canterbury.
The southeast was the focus of Protestant strength.
They were usually laypeople.
Only a tenth of them were clergymen.
They were often young.
Most of them were under thirty and a very high proportion of
those executed were around twenty years old.
These were people who had never really known the old religion
and who had grown up in the new and proved prepared to die for
it.
Well, the effects of this holocaust of Protestant
resistance are debatable.
Certainly Mary, her bishops and her advisers
had simply never expected the resistance to be so widespread
or so prolonged.
But the fact that Mary persisted in her policy to the
end really does her no honor.
If she had no reason to love her father's memory,
it's clear at least that she shared his implacability with
those who opposed her, and by doing so the persecution
helped to cement England's religious divisions and
associated the old religion with a level of persecution that was
wholly unprecedented.
There had never been religious persecution of this intensity,
and indeed it was intense not only by English standards but by
the standards of continental Europe at the time.
Well, what might have happened given more time we'll never
know, because Mary died in November 1558 aged only
forty-two.
Christopher Haigh suggests, as have a number of other
recent historians, that her reign appears to be an
aberration only in hindsight.
He thinks she might have succeeded had she been given
time.
Protestant resistance would have lessened,
the old religion would have become reestablished fully and
normalized, and perhaps that may well be
the case.
But there's also a sense in which one could say her reign
was regarded by at least some as a temporary interlude even
before her death.
Mary was thirty-seven when she came to the throne,
thirty-eight when she married a Spanish prince who was usually
absent from her, abroad seeing to the affairs of
his other possessions.
She was childless despite a couple of phantom pregnancies
which gave her hope.
She had little prospect of bearing an heir,
despite her desperate hopes both for herself and for her
faith.
For Mary all this was undoubtedly a personal tragedy
and it's been suggested that she died in a state of profound
depression in her last months.
Both those who supported her and those who opposed her knew
that in the background was another claimant to the throne,
Princess Elizabeth, and that her accession to the
throne would almost certainly bring about another alteration
in religion.
To some degree it could be anticipated well in advance.
What they didn't know, though, was that this time,
after the twists and turns of the generation between 1527 and
1558, it would last.
And it would last partly because of the nature of the
religious settlement which Elizabeth introduced,
partly because of the way in which she was able to defend it,
and partly for another very simple contingent reason.
When Elizabeth was proclaimed queen on the death of her sister
on November the 17th, 1558, she was only twenty-five
years old and she lived to be seventy--
and more of that next week.